小说：朗读者

These are hours without sleep, which is not to say that they’re sleepless, because on the contrary, they’re not about lack of anything, they’re rich and full. Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again. They are hours when anything is possible, good or bad.

I wasn’t relieved, the way you can sometimes be when you feel funny about a certain ecision and afraid of the consequences and then relieved that you’ve managed to carry out the former without incurring the latter.

Maybe he did try to think about my mother’s question, but once his mind started going, he could only think about work. He was a professor of philosophy, and thinking was his life—thinking and reading and writing and teaching.

Why does it make me so sad when I think back to that time? Is it yearning for past happiness.

Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?

Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily.

she certainly didn’t nourish herself on promises, but was rooted in the here and now.

But waking from a bad dream does not necessarily console you. It can also make you fully

aware of the horror you just dreamed, and even of the truth residing in that horror.

It wasn’t that I for got Hanna. But at a certain point the memory of her stopped ccompanying

me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station.

There are matters one simply cannot get drawn into, that one must distance oneself from, if the price is not life and limb.

The days in court gave me a new hunger for the colors and smells of nature.

I found there was enough variety in the greens that became richer and richer from week to week, and in the floodplain of the Rhine, that was sometimes in a heat haze, sometimes hidden behind curtains of rain and sometimes overhung by storm clouds, and in the smells of the berries and wildflowers in the woods when the sun blazed down on them, and of earth and last year’s rotting leaves when it rained.

In both places, the windows did not open the room to the world beyond, but framed and hung the world in it like a picture.

I felt a great emptiness inside, as if I had been searching for some glimpse, not outside but within myself, and had discovered that there was nothing to be found.

But she looked straight ahead and through everything. A proud, wounded, lost, and infinitely

tired look. A look that wished to see nothing and no one.

My own diagnosis is that the numbness had to overwhelm my body before it would let go of me, before I could let go of it.

Pointing at the guilty parties did not free us from shame, but at least it overcame the suffering we went through on account of it. It converted the passive suffering of shame into energy, activity, aggression.

There’s no need to talk, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.

I had worked at a local government office during my training, and found its rooms, corridors, smells, and employees gray, sterile, and dreary.

Now escape involves not just running away, but arriving somewhere. And the past I arrived in as a legal historian was no less alive than the present. It is also not true, as outsiders might assume, that one can merely observe the richness of life in the past, whereas one can participate in the present. Doing history means building bridges between the past and the present, observing both banks of the river, taking an active part on both sides.

Here, escape is not a preoccupation with the past, but a determined focus on the present and the future that is blind to the legacy of the past which brands us and with which we must live.

They were based on the belief that a good order is intrinsic to the world, and that therefore the world can be brought into good order.

For a long time I believed that there was progress in the history of law, a development owards greater beauty and truth, rationality and humanity, despite terrible setbacks and retreats.

I was proud of her. At the same time, I was sorry for her, sorry for her delayed and failed life, sorry for the delays and failures of life in general. I thought that if the right time gets missed, if one has refused or been refused something for too long, it’s too late, even if it is finally ackled with energy and received with joy. Or is there no such thing as “too late”? Is there only “late,” and is “late” always better than “never”? I don’t know.

Reading aloud was my way of speaking to her, with her.

Can the world become so unbearable to someone after years of loneliness？

The woods were a triumphal parade of brown, yellow, orange, tawny red, and chestnut, and the flaming glowing scarlet of the maples.